When U. S. Sen. Bernie Sanders visits Randolph this week to promote expanded broadband coverage, he will get an earful from officials at ECFiber, who think he’s delivering yesterday’s solution to tomorrow’s needs.

Sanders has billed the 10 a.m. meeting at Judd Hall at VTC as a chance for communities to react to the recent federal grants of more than $170 million in stimulus funds for broadband.

He will be accompanied by Jonathan Adelstein, administrator of the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which awarded the funds.

Also present will be Michel Guité, the CEO of Vermont Telephone Co. (VTel), which received the largest broadband grant awarded to Vermont—more than $100 million.

Sanders noted that he is “extremely excited by these grants and loans” but wants to make sure that Vermonters have their “questions and concerns” about particular projects answered.

He will get plenty of both from representatives of ECFiber, the consortium of 23 towns that has been planning a network of fiber-optic broadband to virtually every home in the White River Valley and beyond.

The organization was stung recently when its own request for a loan was not funded by RUS, which instead awarded a much larger outright grant to VTel, which is located in Springfield.

VTel plans to serve its broadband to most new Internet subscribers via wireless technology, not by laying fiber optic cable, as ECFiber had planned to do.

That’s old technology, which will deliver slower transmission rates, require “hundreds” of new communications towers, and still will fail to reach residents of some valleys, ECFiber says.

The organization released a four-page “white paper” Sept. 17 laying out its arguments.

Wireless Too Slow?

The white paper claims that the maximum transmission speed of wireless technology is in the range of 5-15 million bits per second (Mbps). In just a few years, however, the desirable standard will be up to 100 mbps, while a few years later the goal should be to provide 1000 mbps (one gigabite per second).

Japan and many European companies are already moving toward the 100 Mbps standard, the white paper states. Fiber optic cable can deliver those higher speeds, it is noted.

Further, ECFiber claims, Vermont’s topography—and especially its thick foliage—will be hard or impossible to service through VTel’s wireless technology, and even trying to do so will necessitate the building of hundreds of towers.

Wireless is already available in several area towns and is unsatisfactory, the paper says.

“Wireless fixed broadband is simply not good enough. It has been tried in Vermont and it doesn’t work very well (just ask any user),” the paper concludes. “The gap between wireless and fiber will only widen in the future.”

ECFiber representatives told The Herald they are particularly upset that their application was bypassed by RUS, while an almost identical one was funded in Lake County, Minnesota. That’s another question that Sen. Sanders and Administrator Adelstein can expect to hear Saturday morning.